Josh's Jamtastic Jewels

A revolutionary new argument from eminent Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits attacking the false promise of meritocracy 

It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal – that social and economic rewards should follow achievement... Read more »

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

This magnificent new... Read more »

Author of the National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier. His birth ended his mother's life in... Read more »

As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends... Read more »

Xenophon, after being exiled from Athens, spent the last years of his life hunting, writing, and recalling in his books the great days of the Persian expedition. This record of one of the most famous marches in history contains an account of the day-to-day life of ordinary men and soldiers. It demonstrates how Greek theories of government and... Read more »

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAACThe Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that “reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world” (Kim Stanley Robinson).If J. J. Abrams, Margaret... Read more »

Originally published in 1895, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a marvel of supernatural fiction that has influenced a number of writers in the genre, most notably H. P. Lovecraft. Its powerful combination of horror and lyrical prose has made it a classic, a masterpiece of weird fiction that endures to this day.There is a book that is... Read more »

In the fifth century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took... Read more »

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism

“In Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Ghodsee argues that unregulated capitalism is bad for women, as well as for everyone else. It goes on to argue that by nature capitalism forces a transactional relationship with sex and relationships between men and women. However, if we were to implement some of the gender equalizing policies of socialism such as government healthcare, childcare, schooling, and parental leave, men and women would be starting their romantic and sexual relationships from an equal footing, and as a result lead more happy and fulfilling lives both inside and outside of the bedroom. This book makes a compelling case for studying and implementing the positive aspects of the socialism of the past, so we can have a better future. By no means a manifesto, or apologetics for state socialism, but a call to take a deeper look at what the socialist countries of the past got right, and perhaps a suggestion not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to look at what actually worked and benefited the citizens of those nations.”

Amy, Changing Hands